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If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One...Stewart Lee at Trinity, Tunbridge Wells ★★★★

By Dominic Maxwell in The Times Posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009

If Stewart Lee’s recent stand-up show on BBC Two has brought any newcomers to this latest live show, then they’re jumping in at the deep end here. If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One — yes, the clue is in the title — is right up there with the best work this consistently surprising and beguiling comedian has done.

But as he mixes moments of mock shock with moments of genuine provocation, his most personal revelations with his most far-fetched flights of fancy, we don’t always know where we stand with him.

Does he really wish a hideous death on the Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond? Did Magners cider really take its advertising slogan from a Lee family saying? Did a leading coffee chain really accuse him of faking the stamps on his reward card? Be still, and know.

Mind you, he starts falteringly. His support act, the Canadian comic Tony Law, gets a muted reception — the worst of the tour so far, Lee reproves us. “Now this gig has got off to a bad start,” he says slowly, a teacher taking control of the class, “and if it’s going to work at all, you’re going to have to pick up the pace.”

What I like best about Lee is the way he brings a deeply-felt moral core to work that delights in playing with surfaces. Occasionally he overplays his hand. But mostly his digressions about the mood in the room remind us that our responses really matter — as something worthy of study, not as anything to pander to.

“More than anywhere on the tour,” he tells the supposed bastions of Middle England, “I sense a large Top Gear support.” Pause. “The trouble is,” he continues, “I hate Top Gear.” And, as he goes on to spin a bad-taste yarn about Hammond, ridiculing what he sees as the hypocrisies of Clarkson and crew, the room splits in two.

The context is all there to justify this, just not necessarily when you feel you need it. But show faith and he’ll deconstruct everything, especially his own deconstructions. He takes apart his audience, his looks — a washed-up Terry Christian/Todd Carty/young Albert Finney — and his status as a 41-year-old father resisting gentrification.

Some sequences, such as an inspired one about people who rave on about “the quality of life” abroad, are enabled by sheer performance: control of rhythm, repetition, tone, physicality. Lee has said that he can’t act; this proves him wrong. He even ends on a song, accompanying himself on guitar. There’s a vital sincerity shaking awake all these layers of irony.

One of his targets is Frankie Boyle, who once suggested that stand-ups are no good after 40. Well, Lee rubbishes this like he rubbishes everything else: not in a direct act of revenge, but as a spur to finding material that mixes the deeply felt with the deeply unlikely.

His perpetual games with form mean that he’s not for allcomers. But if you succumb to his spell he’s the most exciting comedian in the country, bar none.

Written by Dominic Maxwell in The Times on 26th November 2009. Filed Under: If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One, Reviews
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